Lehigh English Department Graduate Student Blog

All posts tagged: Film Club

We’ve hit that point in the semester when it’s time to roll up your sleeves and put the pedal to the metal. Classes become hectic as you’re responsible for keeping up with reading loads and researching and producing papers simultaneously. In all this pressure to perform, and the increasingly distracting nice weather, it can be easy to forget to take care of yourself. To acknowledge this stressful period and to continue the conversations on mental […]

It’s been forever! What’s wrong with us? Business, basically. I am utterly sorry, but the fun thing is that we’re gonna recap everything in one big go. It’s gonna be crazy, especially with the crop of movies we have to talk about: 13th, The Handmaiden, Get Out, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Re-Animator. I’m not going to try to tie these together, because that’s probably impossible. Instead, you’ll get capsule reviews. 13th – Ava […]

At first, second, and third glance, these two movies have nothing in common. The first, The Seventh Seal, is a black and white Swedish film from 1957 which uses the black plague as a background for a consideration of death, suffering, and religion. The second, The World’s End, is a fast-paced action movie about drinking, consumer culture, and assimilation. What the films share, though, is an understanding of humanity’s desire to engage in pleasureful activities […]

Another semester begins and that means that reading groups and our own film club are starting up again. I wanted to take some time to reflect on what we did last semester as well as look forward to what we having coming this semester. So let’s go on a trip back and to the future! Get it? It’s a movie reference. First, the stats. We watched the following films last semester: Modern Times, Young Frankenstein, […]

You may have noticed a distinct lack of film club reviews here in the past month. Blame our amazing contributors for filling up our publishing schedule! In the interest of time and work load, I’ve combined the last two films we’ve watched in our club to this one piece, so enjoy a weird and wild mashup of Japanese social-realism and high Gothic horror. Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low is quite different from the movies you […]

October is upon us. The leaves are turning colors, the weather is cooling down (finally), and the amount of essays that are due is terrifyingly appropriate for the month of horror. Nevertheless, there are many events to supplement your busy semester (and maybe even help you relax!). So, without further ado, here are the events for this month: Film Club: High and Low Time: 6 PM to 9 PM Friday 10/7 Place: Drown 019 Akira […]

If you’re blue and you don’t know where to go to, why don’t you go where comedy sits? Puttin’ on Young Frankenstein is a guaranteed cure to your mid-semester despair. Combining the immense talents of Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, Teri Garr, Cloris Leachman, and Peter Boyle, the film really aims at the laugh-a-minute target and it hits most of the time. Gene Wilder’s over-the-top brilliance is on full display throughout as […]

Roger Ebert said that movies are empathy machines. It is difficult and some would say impossible to see through a character’s eyes and not begin to develop empathy with them. Movies can bypass the language barrier that writing necessarily can’t, and no body of work proves that better than Charlie Chaplin’s. As writer, director, actor, and composer, Chaplin retained complete control of his films, especially towards the end of his silent period when he made […]